Digital: A Love Story

The official Web site title card.

Digital: A Love Story is a video game that mixes a desktop simulator with a visual novel. It was developed and published by Christine Love for Linux, Macintosh, and Windows on February 2010. The game was created using Ren'Py. The game is set in 1988 and you play a lone hacker who uses pre-Internet Bulletin Board Systems to uncover a conspiracy and find love.

I found this game because it was highly ranked on JayIsGames.

Status

The game is free. I beat it on 2019-09-19.

Review

4	3	2	7	2

Best Version: 36%

— This section contains spoilers! —

Good

• The game does a fairly decent job of emulating the feel of a pre-Internet computer which had access to basically much nothing.
• Although strong AI wasn't really plausible in the late 1980s, I still liked the idea of the story.
• I like the implied reply mechanic where you have to figure out what you wrote based on the replies.

Bad

• I never really felt much of an attachment to Emilia. There just wasn't enough character expansion for me to appreciate her.
• As you reach the ending, the messages seem to outpace the game. For example, I was getting messages about *Reaper taking out servers before I even connected to any of them and knew what happened.
• The UI is pretty limited (you can't move the windows, clicking off the dialer stops it, etc.) and a little buggy (you can click through windows and hit the buttons behind them). It would have been nice if these were made stronger.
• I didn't quite see the point of being able to send individual primate messages when you could send them all at once. Also, I don't know why you can download messages manually when you still have to be connected to the BBS to retrieve them. I only saw a use for it on the Digital Library BBS that disconnected you.
• The developer missed a lot of opportunities to add puzzles into the game. Password cracking, brute forcing long distance codes, are perfect for puzzle creation, but you don't end up having to do anything to get them. In the end, there wasn't much of a game.
• Another damsel in distress, but at least she becomes a heroine in her own right.

Ugly

• Having to manually dial all of the numbers over and over... and over again was really annoying. While I was fun doing it once and hearing the old modem sounds again, I would have loved a single-click way to handle it.

Media

Videos

• youtube.com/watch?v=0HJvZ3TdTts - Longplay.

Links